


she who fights monsters

by tyger__tyger



Category: Watchmen (Comic)
Genre: Gen, Roche Case, Rule 63, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 06:45:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11686227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyger__tyger/pseuds/tyger__tyger
Summary: Wanda takes the Roche case.





	she who fights monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Basically a rehash of the comic with a few twists thrown in. I hope it isn't too abysmal.

A six year old boy is missing. No word from kidnappers. Police have no leads. Parents distraught, reach out for help. Rorschach promises to return him unharmed.

Later, in the sweltering heat of her one-room tenement apartment, Wanda Kovacs lies curled on her bed, thinking of a little child, abused and frightened. She cries for the very last time, sobs rattling her body, and sleeps for one uneasy hour before her alarm rings.

*

Rorschach visits underworld bars and begins hurting people. She puts twenty people in hospital needlessly. Nite Owl, horrified, withdraws from the case, tells her to step back. Rorschach breaks off their partnership and continues alone. Next night, the twenty first informant gives her a name, Geraldine Antoinette Grice, and an address, a disused dressmaker's in Brooklyn. Looks horrified when he tells her. Other patrons express disbelief. Men hurt children. A woman would never, could never do such a thing.

Kovacs knows better.

*

It's a bad neighborhood, smelling like damp plaster and stained mattresses. Rorschach walks along with the brim of her hat tilted down, watching children play in the street. Sun setting; still too light for the human cockroaches to come crawling out.

She crouches down, peers through a crack in the fence to look at the building. Lights are off. Two attack dogs at rear, fighting over a knob of bone. A chill runs down her spine, despite the heat and the layers. They don't seem interested in her, but she decides to go in through the front, just in case.

A scrap of fabric in the furnace, singed around the edges. Bright primary colors, with an airplane pattern. Something a child would wear.

A cutting board in the kitchen, years worth of deep scratches, traces of blood. Rack of tools with meat cleaver, traces of blood.

No sign of a child anywhere.

A scrap of fabric.

Traces of blood.

A knob of bone.

*

Rorschach opens her eyes.

*

It's nearing eleven when Grice returns. Dark as it gets. Rorschach listens to the whorish click of her high heels. Listens to her call out for the dogs (Wilma and Betty? Stupid names). Watches her look for the intruder. Sees her silhouette, the curve of her stomach thrown into sharp relief.

Freezes.

Decides not to spring the trap. Steps out to confront the woman instead.

Grice denies nothing. Tells Rorschach how desperate she was, how she only wanted a better life for her baby. How she snapped, a single moment of rage when she found out she had the wrong child, and tried to hide the evidence afterward.

Begs and pleads, cuffed to the furnace, free hand on her belly, tears in her eyes.

Rorschach spreads the kerosene around. Pulls a matchbook from her bloodstained coat, souvenir from first underworld bar. Takes one match.

Hesitates.

*

Rorschach tears a page from her journal, writes a note explaining everything, leaves it and the evidence with Grice when she ties her up for the police to find. She'll have her baby in prison, and social services will find a home for him, parents who love him.

If she ever gets out, Rorschach will be waiting.

She sets the empty building alight, a funeral pyre for a little boy who never came home, and watches.


End file.
